The monks and realpolitik

By Salil Tripathi
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
International Herald Tribune

LONDON:

Of all the inanities diplomats utter at the time of an international crisis, the one that towers over all is this: that some foreign ministries expect China to restrain the Burmese junta.

The Chinese have ignored many calls over Darfur; they sent the People's Liberation Army to attack their own unarmed students at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Why would they care for Burmese monks?

More disgraceful is India's role, because more is legitimately expected of India, which never tires of reminding everyone that is the world's largest free-market democracy.

If Indian leaders seem to have forgotten the concept of nonviolent struggle, they should see Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi" again. Replace the Indians making salt in Dandi and Dharasana with Mandalay's saffron-robed monks; switch Gandhi in Yerawada with Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest, and picture baton-wielding Burmese soldiers in place of British troops. That's the scenario being played out in Myanmar. The test of India's democratic credentials is now.

To be sure, India needs oil and gas, and India has every right to make its economy grow. But in its pursuit of energy, it seems to forget the moral appeal which made India unique, and which made its leaders like Gandhi and Nehru such revered figures for Myanmar's nationalists.

Now an Indian government led by a political party that claims allegiance to Nehru has sent its energy minister to Myanmar to sign contracts to assure gas supplies for India, even as Burmese generals are cracking down on their own people who cannot bear the burden of yet another fuel price increase.

There was a time when India knew better, and did better, too. In the 1980s, India allowed Free Burma Radio to operate from its soil - before realpolitik intervened. India honored Aung San Suu Kyi with the Jawaharlal Nehru Award in 1993, two years after she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Realpolitik is certainly not exclusive to India or China. I remember even Nelson Mandela, then president of South Africa, refusing to call for sanctions on Myanmar during an official visit to Singapore. When reminded at a press conference that it was his call for sanctions on South Africa that the world heeded, contributing to the end of apartheid, he said: "That was prisoner Mandela; this is President Mandela." Freed Mandela was a prisoner of realpolitik.

Don't depend on the strongest grouping to which Myanmar belongs to do something, either. Ten years of "constructive engagement" by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has brought us little. All those rounds of golf and dinner parties have given us peaceful monks with fractured skulls. And the world now expects China to do something.

I remember Michael Ignatieff, now a Canadian politician but at that time the director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, speaking in London in the weeks leading up to the war in Iraq. Ignatieff supported the war. (To his credit, he has severely criticized the way the war was fought, the erosion of civil liberties and the abysmal post-conflict administration of Iraq.)

He spelled out the dilemma international law posed in dealing with tyrants. He said waiting for the international community to do the right thing in Iraq would only mean many more might die.

Turning suddenly to the Burmese example, he said: "Will we wait for Aung San Suu Kyi to die in jail and do nothing because the international community cannot agree on what it should do?"

The ultimate tragedy of the Iraq war is exactly that: It has made future interventions - in Darfur, in Yangon - almost impossible.

And so we wait, and see monks with prayers on their lips, and students with hopes in their hearts, marching towards pagodas, as soldiers armed by the Chinese beat them. And the world's largest democracy, India, does nothing.

Salil Tripathi is a London-based writer.